riddles in the dark
by Fialleril
Summary: A series of short fics about each of Loki's three monster children, taking a metaphorical look at them and riffing on Tolkien's riddles from The Hobbit. New: Hel is born in the shadow between the stars.
1. this thing all things devours

I have started a series of short fics about each of Loki's three monster children, taking a metaphorical look at them and riffing on Tolkien's riddles from _The Hobbit_. It started with this one, when I realized that this riddle fit Fenrir quite well, and its answer gave me a whole new way of understanding the all-devouring wolf and his meaning and importance in the mythology.

There will eventually be a riddle fic for Jormungand and Hel as well, and most likely a bonus one for Loki too. (Go ahead, guess which riddle from _The Hobbit _he is. I think it's actually pretty easy.)

**Warning:** references to canon torture

**Notes:** Yes, all the verb tenses are deliberate. This was loads of fun.

* * *

**this thing all things devours**

_This thing all things devours:  
Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;  
Gnaws iron, bites steel;  
Grinds hard stones to meal;  
Slays king, ruins town,  
And beats high mountain down._

* * *

Fenrir remembers everything.

His first memory is of ice, a thousand years and more before his birth. Before that, there is an unquenchable fire.

He remembers the first things (or the things that are called first, by the Aesir): the ancient one born of ice, and the young children who come after, who will one day call themselves gods. He remembers their first breaths, their halting explorations of empty mist, and the first talk of something else. And then this: blood spilled on snow, an enmity born, and a world built out of bones.

He remembers first parent Ymir's death cry, the flood of gore that drowns most of his kin, the eyebrows arranged around a little enclosure where the trees are taught to walk and breathe and speak. Fenrir's own parent knows something of memory independent of birth: Lodur sets the spark of life in the tree people and teaches them to laugh decades before Loki is born in the Iron Wood.

Fenrir remembers that, too, though it was an unremarkable birth as such things go. Hardly worthy of comment, except for what came after.

And he remembers the after, as well, the after which is also a before, and a now. Words fail in their meanings, but he remembers still. Fenrir's father loves words with all the tenderness of a mother with a babe at the breast, and all the laughing violence of a child. But then, all words are lies.

Fenrir's own birth comes (is coming, came, will come) on a cold howling dark night beneath the eaves of the Iron Wood. He remembers his parents' fierce delight, and their smiles. And, further off, the sudden starting awareness of the one who calls himself Allfather. Fenrir calls his awareness fear, but only because he sees how it will end (how it has ended, how it will begin, how it is).

He remembers the trick that bound him, together with the day-century-seconds of his torturous binding. The sword in his mouth is a festering wound, and a memory. He consumes the sun and the moon, and tomorrow he will eat Tyr's hand. Light flits and shatters on the walls of his prison, and in the corners of his cave, small flowers gleam in the lawns of Asgard and the nine worlds sink, engulfed in fire, into the sea.

Fenrir remembers the end.

Yesterday, Fenrir's bonds will break and he goes less to war than to fulfillment, less to completion than simply back to himself. Along the way, he ate the Allfather. But words fail, and nothing is (will be, has ever been) permanent. Nothing but memory, which is the greatest lie of all, a thought imposing linearity on the world.

So Fenrir lies bound (is waiting to be bound, escapes his bonds), and from his slavering mouth flow deep, hastening rivers which rush on, inexorable, wearing away at rock, carving and recarving their paths into this world of bone, flowing on to the sea. The Aesir learn the prophecies of Ragnarok, and Loki is bound, and Balder is killed, and the final battle (first battle, only battle) is fought, and the giant Ymir slain and the world built out of bone. A fire consumes everything. A flood washed all away. Some clever storyteller will remember, and lie, and make the world from branches and failing words.

There is (was, will be) ice, and unquenchable fire. Fenrir remembers everything.


	2. and yet never grows

The riddle for this one isn't quite as obvious, but I am using the actual answer to the riddle, "mountains," as a metonym for "the foundations of the earth." The title is a bit delightfully ironic, since of course Jormungand is famous for his never ending growth spurts.

Riddles still belong to Tolkien.

* * *

**and yet never grows**

_What has roots as nobody sees,_

_Is taller than trees_

_Up, up it goes,_

_And yet never grows?_

* * *

Jormungand is exactly as he appears, only more so.

He is all sinuous, sudden movement and tireless, motionless contemplation, bound together by a relentless but often unnoticed curiosity. His form is a snake's, and he has as many skins as one. A new skin forms, and the old sloughs off, forgotten, to be trampled in the dust.

Unlike his father, Jormungand is not a shape changer. For all his shed skins, he holds a single essence, fixed but not immovable. He drifts like water: flowing, falling, gliding, splashing, corroding, thundering. He sees the shapes in rock that, in a thousand thousand years' time, will become gouges, holes, deep clefts for the running stream. It is a way of seeing he shares with his brother.

The world is fluid around him, as changeable as the words that define it.

Jormungand has never had much use for words. Though he shares with his siblings a love of their parent's stories, he cares little for lies himself. Or, at least, not for lies that are spoken. The physical lies of space and boundary are more insidious, and more amusing. The boundless sea, the eternal mountains, the ageless earth, the impregnable wall—all these are far greater lies than all Bragi's songs or Odin's clever travel disguises.

His father hates walls, but Jormungand laughs at them.

Once, when he was still very young, Loki brought him to visit Asgard. Jormungand remembers studying the enclosure of the gods with a keen interest, noting all the secret nooks, the fractures between stone and mortar, the slowly expanding fissures in wood. Asgard is the most structured place he has ever seen, which means it also has the most cracks in its joints. Even then, the wall that Loki helped to build already had gaps wide enough for Jormungand to slither through.

He did so often, crawling into the gap and resting there, half in Asgard, half in the nameless place that is Outside. He could see how it disturbed the Aesir, and wasn't surprised. A wall, after all, is only as strong as its cracks.

Jormungand has seen much of walls, now, and even more of cracks, since his binding.

But things shift, worlds as much as words (and this is ultimately only two ways of saying the same thing), and he is not concerned. Odin Allfather has cast him out and charged him with the burden of circling the vast shoreless world. But, again, shift the words and it would be as true (and as false) to say his twisting coils are themselves the shore, the tireless sea breaking upon them as upon smooth worn stones, and in the curve of himself he shapes the world.

It is not, he thinks, a notion that occurred to Odin, who first shaped the world himself from the bones of Jormungand's ancient ancestor. For this reason alone he laughs, sometimes, pondering all of the Allfather's many walls—their hairline fractures, tumbled stones, patches of weathered mortar, even, in places, their gaping fissures. And he shifts his coiled body, now and then, watching the waves stutter against the moving wall, watching the foundations of the world tremble, crack apart, and remake themselves, never quite the same.

Jormungand watches words and worlds alike shift, and spends his slow days pondering walls, eternal decrees, and other lies.


	3. comes first and follows after

Riddles still belong to Tolkien.**  
**

**Warning: **Potential body horror.**  
**

**Notes: **Hopefully it will be clear enough, but Hel refers to Angrboda as "mother" and Loki as "mama" (I've combined a couple of myths here).**  
**

* * *

**comes first and follows after**

_It cannot be seen, cannot be felt,  
Cannot be heard, cannot be smelt.  
It lies behind stars and under hills,  
And empty holes it fills.  
It comes first and follows after  
Ends life, kills laughter._

* * *

Hel is born in the shadow between the stars, in the breathless dark and the confluence of her mother's death and her mama's desperation.

She remembers this—the moment of her making and of her birth—not as a story told to her by another, but as a misty shape, faintly glimpsed in a mirror, a shape that wears her own face. She remembers it because she was there, as she has always been.

Later, after she is born and grown somewhat, she does hear the story. It is never told directly to her, nor is it ever intentional, on anyone's part, that she hears it. But Hel is a shadow in this world, and she hears everything. How the Aesir took a Jotun witch and burned her, and how, after, Loki came and ate the witch's heart and got himself with child.

It's the witch, they whisper to one another, that makes Hel what she is. It's her heart that makes her rot.

Hel knows this is a lie, but it's the kind of lie that is really true. And she likes the idea that she is like her mother, somehow. She likes the sense of binding ties across time and space and other lies.

But HelHeH has never been bound by the rules of place. Born in the space between stars, she learned early how to be nowhere at once. So early that it is just as true to say she has always known. There is nowhere she has not been, nowhere she is not now.

She unsettles the Aesir, during that very short time she lives with them, and she knows it. She is too quiet, too sudden, too sharp edged and oddly gentle at all the wrong times.

Hel is a girl with deep-pool eyes and hair like a summer's night—that is, sudden darkness shot through with sudden dancing light. Her smile is warm and strange, all-encompassing but not quite directed at any one thing. It fades when she focuses her eyes too sharply, or else, some have said, it has teeth in it.

Most, though, prefer not to speak of Hel's teeth.

Her shape, they say, is strange. Not for itself, but for the effect it leaves, the sense of forgotten knowing.

Heimdall says, "She is half—" but can't seem to finish. Thor says, "She stops—" but doesn't know what she stops. Freyja, who knows more of shapes than any true daughter of the Aesir, says, "She is terribly beautiful," and means every word, exactly so.

Bragi, accounted wisest with words, says, "She is a monster."

It is a good word, as words go. A word she has in common with her mother, and her brothers. But not her mama. (Not yet.) Hel smiles when she hears it, a brief shine of teeth in the dark.

It is a truth, but not the only one. Hel is a mirror held up against the world, a darkling glass that hides more than it shows.

And words are a power of their own. Hel's mama makes a place among the Aesir with sharp-edged words and cleverly shaped tales, but Hel's power is found in silence, in the gaping spaces between words, the shadows that flow between things spoken.

She is not long among the Aesir before her banishment, and this does not surprise her. She is a shadow of fear in their minds, a nameless wordless thing that waits in the dark, just beyond the lights of the mead hall, just behind the final verses of song. So she is quickly sent away, out of sight and out of thought, except for distant plans and Odin's dim talk of endings.

At least, so the words go.

But in the dark spaces between the words, she remains. When the decree comes, she meets the Aesir with a smile (but none of them can meet her teeth) and herself walks calmly off the edge of the world, into her new kingdom, into a place that is already (has always been) hers, where she is already and has always been, just as she is everywhere and nowhere else.

And she remains as she always has—everywhere, and nowhere. In the shadows between the brightly lit mead halls, in the silences between words, in the prophecies which are more unspoken than spoken, in the darkness that haunts Odin's thoughts and Balder's dreams and Frigg's endless silent vision.

She builds her hall from mists and laughter and the remembered stories of the children who come to her, and the food and drink she serves are nameless things that have no equal. To those who live in the brief spaces between silences, who live in light and words, her hall is a place as monstrous as herself.

But to her guests, to the children and the women and the creaking old men and all the shameless dead, whose need for light and fear has passed, to them silence can only be a refuge. So Hel is where she has always been, sharp edged and gentle, and she welcomes all who come to her.

One day, perhaps, she will welcome the floundered gods themselves.


End file.
